Last night Fox's Tucker Carlson
praised Trump's decision not to go forward with a planned attack against Iran which the
president claims would have killed approximately 150 people in response to a downed drone, which
if true would have been a profoundly barbaric response to a broken toy plane and would have led to retaliations from Iran, followed by a chain of military actions which could have escalated God knows how far.
Carlson, who
has been credited with persuading Trump against further military escalations with Iran, lit into the neoconservative elements of Trump's cabinet with unprecedented viciousness. He called National Security Advisor John Bolton a "bureaucratic tapeworm" who never suffers any consequences for his relentless warmongering and accusing him and his collaborators of deliberately engineering a provocation to lead to direct military confrontation. Carlson urged Trump to expunge the influencers who are pushing for a war with Iran, and cautioned that it would cost him re-election.
"Bombing Iran would have ended [Trump's] political career in a minute," Carlson said. "There'd be no chance of re-election after that." Carlson's first guest,
The American Conservative's Robert Merry,
plainly stated the likely reason for Bolton's deceitful manipulations, saying that Americans are typically reluctant to go to war and citing a few of the historical instances in which they were tricked into consenting to it by those who desire mass military violence.
"So, you're saying that there is a long, almost unbroken history of lying our way into war?" Carlson asked his guest rhetorically.
"Lying sometimes, not always lying, sometimes it's manipulations, but yeah," Merry replied.
"America's warmaking history indicates that there's been significant instances of that kind of maneuvering, manipulations, and in some instances lying - Vietnam is a great example - to get us into wars that the American people weren't clamoring for."
Both men are correct. The US empire does indeed have an
extensive and well-documented history of using lies, manipulations and distortions to manufacture consent for war from a populace that would otherwise choose peace, and a
Reuters poll released last month found that
only 12 percent of Americans favor attacking Iranian military interests without having been attacked first.
Comment: You can read the full transcript of the interview on the Kremlin's website.